Satisfied with this answer, Lestat's trajectory sways close to Louis' path as he speaks.
"I should begin in New Orleans," he says. "Or end with it. Perhaps that will be the difference between playing an acoustic on the corner of Bourbon Street or filling the Fillmore."
Home on either side, although he has had his doubts. His love affair with the city has lasted, it's true, but had he not been waiting in the place he knew he could be found? And was found? It had felt like something of an unshackling to leave it behind. But all the same. He is sentimental.
"I could play here. In this park, even, why not. Like Luciano Pavarotti and Diana Ross before me. No tickets, no charge, anyone can come by."
Money would have to change hands, Louis suspects. Some permits, some word of mouth. But not impossible.
Lestat's arm brushes his. Louis refrains from leaning in to him. They are walking, talking. It's been a good night. No need to strain it by inviting in more ghosts when they've already navigated past the most vivid of them in the opera house.
"I like New Orleans though," surely cannot be a surprise. "Like it as a beginning, and as an end of a tour."
Sentimental.
But then, Louis had missed New Orleans. It has come creeping back into his voice in the wake of that visit, short stay enough to reawaken what had been put aside for long decades.
"A slow crawl up the east coast, and then we chase the sun to Las Vegas, Los Angeles," and San Francisco, but it would probably sound like needling to say it, and Lestat only shrugs. "Anywhere. An American tour, in the beginning." He has no music, or a band, or a contract, but isn't it fun to imagine?
After that, a world of possibility. France, of course. The United Kingdom. Japan. Australia.
But, "Will I have to begin with the Emirates for you to make use of VIP entry?"
Lestat doesn't halt their walk, but it's an easy habit to step a little longer so that he can elegantly pivot, walk backwards, consider Louis as they go. Even in these shoes. On that note, he thinks he could get used to being properly taller than the other man, but, they are still friends, so it hardly matters—
Not the thing to focus on. Such a decisive No, though.
"You will always be invited, Louis," Lestat says. "In any city, any country you like."
A serious proposition in what still amounts to fantasy.
They are decades removed from New Orleans. They are in a future and place where no one would look twice at them if Louis were to take Lestat by his lapels and draw him back in to him.
His palms itch with it. Daniel would laugh, Louis thinks. Daniel would laugh a the predictability of Louis du Lac.
Louis, who is companion enough for himself.
He wants to choose. He has been chosen, possessed. Has been tended to and cultivated, pruned as surely as the tree that had once grown in his atrium.
It isn't about being alone. It is about the choice to be otherwise.
"Then I'll come. Wherever you are," Louis promises.
Lestat pivots out of his backwards march, coming to walk back in step with Louis on his other side.
Pleased, clearly, with some amount of containment. During the lukewarm years, there'd always been some sense of withholding. Like Louis didn't want to encourage him and his antics, the force of his affections. Here, a promise to attend his currently make-believe music concerts feels like an easily avoidable thing, and yet.
"Even if you don't like my kind of music? What then?" A tactical retreat into the kind of teasing that is also fishing for more.
"Then you will have to teach me how to hear it," Louis tells him. "Like you did with Bach. And opera."
The things Louis had never given himself permission to hear as he should, to be moved, to feel how deeply these things could touch him.
How little of that had made it into the interview. They'd exchanged a fair bit, hadn't they? What they loved, what they couldn't tolerate, teasing arguments that went nowhere in particular, Louis remembered them all. Those early days in New Orleans, when Lestat would await him every night to resume the conversation from the evening before.
Even this, Lestat pivoting back to him reminds Louis of it.
Other acceptable answers: that Louis would attend anyway, or that Louis would love anything he makes, of course.
Acceptable, pretty, but this answer he gets instead is perfect.
A long breath out, and Lestat moves his hands from his pockets so that he can capture Louis' arm with his own, entwining them together, elbows hooked. He imagines them an unusual and glamourous sight like this, and it pleases him all the more.
"The steadfast pupil still," he says, all fondness. "Except now I can summon up documentaries and videos on our little screens instead of subjecting you to endless expository tinkering on the grand. Or, not only that."
And if there is some little heart twinge for that, his absence of piano, or really any instrument at all, it's easy to discard. They're having a nice time.
"Daniel has told me you have a good eye for art. Will you teach me in return?"
The link of their arms loosens something in Louis' chest. Like he can breathe easier, Lestat drawn so close, falling into step with him.
Reaching over to tap two fingers to Lestat's arm, tell him:
"I'll teach you anything you like," even as he tempers this with, "Though I remember you having a pretty sharp eye yourself, back when."
Lestat loved beauty. It wasn't exactly the same as what they're discussing, knowing a piece of art's value, seeing something in it that elevates it past the pedestrian.
But why waste an opportunity to flatter, knowing how Lestat enjoyed it?
Louis flatters him. Lestat wants to bite him all over.
Contains himself to a broad grin, a brief lean of his weight as they go. "Then you can encourage my natural affinity," he will allow, "and explain to me why this or that paint splatter changed the modern art world in 1949, why it is worth a thousand dollars."
Better and more consumable than books, certainly. It would be pleasing to hear Louis wax poetic about something Lestat can absorb in a single sitting.
To Vermont, he recalls. And then onward from there, northward into Canada and then presumably west. Rachida has the details. Is likely spending her days arranging the luxury of Louis' travel.
A far cry from stowing away with Claudia, the weeks-long ordeal of travel by ship.
"Maybe you find the time to come look at my collection, someday."
Unspoken invitation. Dubai, an ocean away. Perhaps Lestat would never be interested in the life Louis had there, even stripped of Armand's presence.
For a moment, it was easy to imagine that they were two vampires together in a city that they lived or at least lingered in, and not thrown together by strange circumstance. Not close to moving on, not due to separate again. The tour is a fantasy. Louis being drawn back across the ocean is a reality.
A painting he would like, in a guest room. Bittersweet.
"Yes," because of course Lestat says yes. "Perhaps I'll make my own purchases when I do."
His hand slips down, and scratches a nail gently against Louis' wrist. "You still owe me a photograph."
Nervous, in a strange way. A vulnerable flutter of anxiety over offering up his work for Lestat's scrutiny, just as he had felt for Daniel, or more so.
They are a short ways from a bench. A street lamp, still alight for a few more hours. Louis' memories circle around and around to New Orleans, long evenings spent walking together. He'd missed them. He'd been missing them for decades.
"Sit with me," Louis requests, lest Lestat thinks Louis is skimping on whats owed. "I have it."
Lestat lets go of Louis' arm once they reach the bench, and they sit. A flood of memory, immediately, their favourite place in the park, a clear view of St. Louis Cathedral, a place that had felt like it was all theirs. A place to say anything at all to one another. A place Louis had once gone to die, nearly.
A different bench, a different park. Lestat scopes out the view, the looming city lights, the lush trees, this green little heartland of Manhattan. Yes, he will play here. He will play in Jackson Square too, why not. Mark his territories.
Hooks a leg over a knee, an elbow against the back of the bench. "I didn't bring anything for you," he says. Admission. "But I'm working on it."
"You're here," Louis tells him. "That's gift enough."
How easy it would be for Lestat to have remained in New Orleans? Hidden beneath floorboards, letting water seep in to wash away whatever remained of him? He could have banished Louis from that cottage. He could have refused to see him now.
Louis reaches over to take Lestat's hand, curls fingers beneath his as he reaches beneath the fall of his jacket to some hidden interior pocket.
"I had it framed," explains the package, squared in its rich gold wrapper. "One of the few I have of Claudia."
The night of that first hunt with the coven. Claudia smiling with a mouthful of fangs, glowing so bright that it seems as if it should lighten the whole portrait.
Dreamy amounts of dopamine, these little declarations and gestures, these little returns to form. By now, Louis could produce an out of focus photograph of a dog urinating on a fire hydrant and Lestat would wax poetic for its composition.
And then, disarming. Lestat opening his mouth to speak before he looks down at the gift, wrapped in gold.
Takes it into his hands. And why shouldn't he have anticipated an image of Claudia? He has seen a couple of them, and so at least there is no shock to the notion, except there still is, somehow. One of the few, and Lestat is carefully opening it, a fussy way of going at the folded edges and peeling it back, and turning the framed image around until its righted in his hands.
Another disarming thing, to see her this way. The vampire he made, the vampire she became, against all odds. "Look at her," he murmurs. She isn't even posing, really. No, no deliberate grimace for the camera, just a spontaneous grin of sharp teeth in the blur of a moment.
Louis' arm stretches across the back of the bench, body turning in as Lestat tears the paper, looks over the photograph. Louis had chosen a simple frame, no distractions from the radiance of Claudia's face.
"You'd have been proud to see her that night," Louis says, carving away every part of that outing that wasn't Claudia, exuberant in her hunting. "She was..."
There are some tragedies that cannot be ascribed to a certain gremlin.
Her death, yes, but also this: Lestat's absence, implied in this photograph. Her happiness returned to her, however briefly, however falsely. It is a strange and tangled mess of feeling, looking at her, so happy. The hurt of her betrayal, the strange sense of pride he has for her cutting him down so well, the petty angst for her finding a life beyond his shadow, and then all of it swallowed by that big black shadow of grief.
But it's a lovely photograph. His hands are relaxed holding the picture frame, but to his sense of composure he clutches with a white-knuckled grip.
He must say something nice. Something that isn't insane, like, I feel extremely bad now but if someone were to take this from me I would bite off their limbs, even though this is the most apt description. Deep breaths, Lioncourt.
"I'm proud of her all the time," is something true, excavated just for Louis, looking to him. A smile, tight, and a leaning in of his weight. "Whether she would like it or not."
Even that slight movement is enough to draw Louis' arm from the back of the bench to Lestat's shoulders. A grounding kind of comfort, Louis holding him closer as Lestat studies the picture.
"I know," Louis promises. "I think..."
A pause. His fingers tighten at Lesat's shoulder, breathes out.
"I think she'd hate it," is true, but only half. "And I think she'd value it. Yours more than mine, at least when it came to the vampire she became."
An area Louis could never hope to match Lestat in. Louis, reluctant still but more so in those days. Claudia had outstripped him before they'd ever left New Orleans.
And she'd been lonesome, Louis knows. She'd been lonely hunting on her own. Maybe that would have always been the way in which she and Lestat would relate. Hunting. If they'd had time to find their footing.
Maybe that should make him flinch, the word 'hate'. But it's a strange word. Passionate. Different to loathe, disdain, disgust, and maybe Claudia would summon those too, but no, Louis is right, she would hate his pride in her, and the thought draws a fond smile across Lestat's face as he leans into the way Louis holds him around the shoulders.
They would have hunted together. Their hunts prior had always been teacher and student, and then, after that, they were apart from one another. Too much to tolerate. But if things had been different—
They would have hunted together, and well, he thinks. Son petite monstre.
Yes, his eyes prickle, but Lestat distracts himself by bring up a hand and delicately snaring Louis' chin, leaning in to kiss him sweetly next to his mouth. A little too intimate, maybe, for mon ami, but still avoiding the thing they're avoiding.
"I love it," he tells him, tapping a finger where he has them placed before dropping his hand. "Merci. And look how well you captured her."
Yielding, a soft exhale of breath as Lestat leans in. Long held instinct parting his lips slightly, expectant, heartbeat leaping in his chest. His fingers tighten in turn at Lestat's shoulder, holding fast as Lestat's lips find the corner of his mouth.
Mon ami Lestat had said.
Louis thinks of that again now, how it feels mismatched. Like a loss, despite Lestat being so present.
A deep breath in. Finds a smile for him, pleased with Lestat's approval. Let's all the rest fall away, as he explains, "She made it easy. I was lucky to have turned when she did."
She'd always been turning to him on those days, reassuring herself that Louis was still there. Still following, keeping pace. That he hadn't fallen too far behind.
He will credit himself, too, with Claudia's flair for the dramatic. Had, certainly, that terrible day on the stage. Thoughts Lestat considers keeping to himself to ruminate on, leaning comfortably against Louis on the bench as he considers the photograph, allows himself to acclimate to looking at it without some internal flinch.
Instead, he speaks it out loud. Neither of them have had much opportunity to do so, for different reasons. "That terrible day on the stage," he says, and knows it may hurt Louis to bring up, but bring it up he does. "I had worked hard, you know, to bring the crowd under my thrall. You make them laugh, you make them sad, you give them these petty things and they will do anything for you. Almost."
Not enough. A breath in, released as a sigh. "But there was a shift, when she took the spotlight. All eyes on her. I could feel it, the way she changed the room. Their ruthless joy like a quiet pond, and then, ripples. Terror, just a moment. Held breaths."
Louis was there, of course, but perhaps there is only so much attention to be paid when you've been hamstrung, beaten, preparing to die.
"I thought, there she is. This one I've made. This one I had every fear for, in the beginning. She looked at me," no, not that moment, this earlier one, "she looked at me and I think she knew. My hated pride."
Yes, it does hurt. It hurts as it will always hurt. Maybe more so now for the freshness of the wound, torn open again by Daniel's revelations.
Lestat isn't prying. But the memory stirs up pain regardless, something to weather with a deep inhale, fingers running up and down the fabric of Leatat's jacket. He is here. They are here.
Claudia is still gone.
"Our daughter," Louis murmurs. A crack in his voice, eased by a breath, a pause. Gathering steadiness as he tells him, "She had plenty of you in her."
How different would things have been if they'd stayed? If Louis had tried harder to dissuade her from her plans?
"Headstrong," Louis says, a little laughter in his voice. "Talented. Voice like you wouldn't believe."
Twisted into something unbearable. But they don't need talk about that. Not tonight.
"I wish you'd seen her," softly. "I wish you'd gotten to see her before."
Lestat is watching him as he speaks, no impulse to hide away from it, even this close. Studying Louis' expression, drinking in the feeling of his voice, even as his own eyes remain that specific kind of glossy-bloodshot, both in concert with and in contrast to the way the corner of his mouth ticks up.
Fond. Devastated. He gives a small, hasty nod at this last thing.
Thinking further back, to that precious period of time where Lestat had gotten everything he had ever wanted. Louis' hand in his, Claudia's in his other. He just hadn't known it.
"Louis," he says. Voice not quite even, but we continue. "It was me that ruined it for us. I know it now."
He didn't before, not even in his coffin in New Orleans, laying there for however long beneath the trash. Not even during the awful pantomime in the theatre. Perhaps while reflecting on his origins in Magnus' prison. Perhaps after he'd read his own story, spoken by Louis, penned by Molloy. But now—
It isn't hard, to trace the fuck ups. Before the ball. Before the fight. "And I am sorry."
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"I should begin in New Orleans," he says. "Or end with it. Perhaps that will be the difference between playing an acoustic on the corner of Bourbon Street or filling the Fillmore."
Home on either side, although he has had his doubts. His love affair with the city has lasted, it's true, but had he not been waiting in the place he knew he could be found? And was found? It had felt like something of an unshackling to leave it behind. But all the same. He is sentimental.
"I could play here. In this park, even, why not. Like Luciano Pavarotti and Diana Ross before me. No tickets, no charge, anyone can come by."
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Money would have to change hands, Louis suspects. Some permits, some word of mouth. But not impossible.
Lestat's arm brushes his. Louis refrains from leaning in to him. They are walking, talking. It's been a good night. No need to strain it by inviting in more ghosts when they've already navigated past the most vivid of them in the opera house.
"I like New Orleans though," surely cannot be a surprise. "Like it as a beginning, and as an end of a tour."
Sentimental.
But then, Louis had missed New Orleans. It has come creeping back into his voice in the wake of that visit, short stay enough to reawaken what had been put aside for long decades.
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After that, a world of possibility. France, of course. The United Kingdom. Japan. Australia.
But, "Will I have to begin with the Emirates for you to make use of VIP entry?"
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Are they discussing this seriously?
Louis chooses to take it as such. Serious plans. A return to the stage for Lestat, Louis playing adoring audience member.
"If this is an invitation."
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Not the thing to focus on. Such a decisive No, though.
"You will always be invited, Louis," Lestat says. "In any city, any country you like."
A serious proposition in what still amounts to fantasy.
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His palms itch with it. Daniel would laugh, Louis thinks. Daniel would laugh a the predictability of Louis du Lac.
Louis, who is companion enough for himself.
He wants to choose. He has been chosen, possessed. Has been tended to and cultivated, pruned as surely as the tree that had once grown in his atrium.
It isn't about being alone. It is about the choice to be otherwise.
"Then I'll come. Wherever you are," Louis promises.
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Lestat pivots out of his backwards march, coming to walk back in step with Louis on his other side.
Pleased, clearly, with some amount of containment. During the lukewarm years, there'd always been some sense of withholding. Like Louis didn't want to encourage him and his antics, the force of his affections. Here, a promise to attend his currently make-believe music concerts feels like an easily avoidable thing, and yet.
"Even if you don't like my kind of music? What then?" A tactical retreat into the kind of teasing that is also fishing for more.
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The things Louis had never given himself permission to hear as he should, to be moved, to feel how deeply these things could touch him.
How little of that had made it into the interview. They'd exchanged a fair bit, hadn't they? What they loved, what they couldn't tolerate, teasing arguments that went nowhere in particular, Louis remembered them all. Those early days in New Orleans, when Lestat would await him every night to resume the conversation from the evening before.
Even this, Lestat pivoting back to him reminds Louis of it.
"I'm still capable of learning."
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Acceptable, pretty, but this answer he gets instead is perfect.
A long breath out, and Lestat moves his hands from his pockets so that he can capture Louis' arm with his own, entwining them together, elbows hooked. He imagines them an unusual and glamourous sight like this, and it pleases him all the more.
"The steadfast pupil still," he says, all fondness. "Except now I can summon up documentaries and videos on our little screens instead of subjecting you to endless expository tinkering on the grand. Or, not only that."
And if there is some little heart twinge for that, his absence of piano, or really any instrument at all, it's easy to discard. They're having a nice time.
"Daniel has told me you have a good eye for art. Will you teach me in return?"
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Reaching over to tap two fingers to Lestat's arm, tell him:
"I'll teach you anything you like," even as he tempers this with, "Though I remember you having a pretty sharp eye yourself, back when."
Lestat loved beauty. It wasn't exactly the same as what they're discussing, knowing a piece of art's value, seeing something in it that elevates it past the pedestrian.
But why waste an opportunity to flatter, knowing how Lestat enjoyed it?
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Contains himself to a broad grin, a brief lean of his weight as they go. "Then you can encourage my natural affinity," he will allow, "and explain to me why this or that paint splatter changed the modern art world in 1949, why it is worth a thousand dollars."
Better and more consumable than books, certainly. It would be pleasing to hear Louis wax poetic about something Lestat can absorb in a single sitting.
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To Vermont, he recalls. And then onward from there, northward into Canada and then presumably west. Rachida has the details. Is likely spending her days arranging the luxury of Louis' travel.
A far cry from stowing away with Claudia, the weeks-long ordeal of travel by ship.
"Maybe you find the time to come look at my collection, someday."
Unspoken invitation. Dubai, an ocean away. Perhaps Lestat would never be interested in the life Louis had there, even stripped of Armand's presence.
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A painting he would like, in a guest room. Bittersweet.
"Yes," because of course Lestat says yes. "Perhaps I'll make my own purchases when I do."
His hand slips down, and scratches a nail gently against Louis' wrist. "You still owe me a photograph."
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Nervous, in a strange way. A vulnerable flutter of anxiety over offering up his work for Lestat's scrutiny, just as he had felt for Daniel, or more so.
They are a short ways from a bench. A street lamp, still alight for a few more hours. Louis' memories circle around and around to New Orleans, long evenings spent walking together. He'd missed them. He'd been missing them for decades.
"Sit with me," Louis requests, lest Lestat thinks Louis is skimping on whats owed. "I have it."
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A different bench, a different park. Lestat scopes out the view, the looming city lights, the lush trees, this green little heartland of Manhattan. Yes, he will play here. He will play in Jackson Square too, why not. Mark his territories.
Hooks a leg over a knee, an elbow against the back of the bench. "I didn't bring anything for you," he says. Admission. "But I'm working on it."
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How easy it would be for Lestat to have remained in New Orleans? Hidden beneath floorboards, letting water seep in to wash away whatever remained of him? He could have banished Louis from that cottage. He could have refused to see him now.
Louis reaches over to take Lestat's hand, curls fingers beneath his as he reaches beneath the fall of his jacket to some hidden interior pocket.
"I had it framed," explains the package, squared in its rich gold wrapper. "One of the few I have of Claudia."
The night of that first hunt with the coven. Claudia smiling with a mouthful of fangs, glowing so bright that it seems as if it should lighten the whole portrait.
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And then, disarming. Lestat opening his mouth to speak before he looks down at the gift, wrapped in gold.
Takes it into his hands. And why shouldn't he have anticipated an image of Claudia? He has seen a couple of them, and so at least there is no shock to the notion, except there still is, somehow. One of the few, and Lestat is carefully opening it, a fussy way of going at the folded edges and peeling it back, and turning the framed image around until its righted in his hands.
Another disarming thing, to see her this way. The vampire he made, the vampire she became, against all odds. "Look at her," he murmurs. She isn't even posing, really. No, no deliberate grimace for the camera, just a spontaneous grin of sharp teeth in the blur of a moment.
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Louis' arm stretches across the back of the bench, body turning in as Lestat tears the paper, looks over the photograph. Louis had chosen a simple frame, no distractions from the radiance of Claudia's face.
"You'd have been proud to see her that night," Louis says, carving away every part of that outing that wasn't Claudia, exuberant in her hunting. "She was..."
Trailing into quiet for a moment. Remembering.
"She was so happy."
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Her death, yes, but also this: Lestat's absence, implied in this photograph. Her happiness returned to her, however briefly, however falsely. It is a strange and tangled mess of feeling, looking at her, so happy. The hurt of her betrayal, the strange sense of pride he has for her cutting him down so well, the petty angst for her finding a life beyond his shadow, and then all of it swallowed by that big black shadow of grief.
But it's a lovely photograph. His hands are relaxed holding the picture frame, but to his sense of composure he clutches with a white-knuckled grip.
He must say something nice. Something that isn't insane, like, I feel extremely bad now but if someone were to take this from me I would bite off their limbs, even though this is the most apt description. Deep breaths, Lioncourt.
"I'm proud of her all the time," is something true, excavated just for Louis, looking to him. A smile, tight, and a leaning in of his weight. "Whether she would like it or not."
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"I know," Louis promises. "I think..."
A pause. His fingers tighten at Lesat's shoulder, breathes out.
"I think she'd hate it," is true, but only half. "And I think she'd value it. Yours more than mine, at least when it came to the vampire she became."
An area Louis could never hope to match Lestat in. Louis, reluctant still but more so in those days. Claudia had outstripped him before they'd ever left New Orleans.
And she'd been lonesome, Louis knows. She'd been lonely hunting on her own. Maybe that would have always been the way in which she and Lestat would relate. Hunting. If they'd had time to find their footing.
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They would have hunted together. Their hunts prior had always been teacher and student, and then, after that, they were apart from one another. Too much to tolerate. But if things had been different—
They would have hunted together, and well, he thinks. Son petite monstre.
Yes, his eyes prickle, but Lestat distracts himself by bring up a hand and delicately snaring Louis' chin, leaning in to kiss him sweetly next to his mouth. A little too intimate, maybe, for mon ami, but still avoiding the thing they're avoiding.
"I love it," he tells him, tapping a finger where he has them placed before dropping his hand. "Merci. And look how well you captured her."
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Mon ami Lestat had said.
Louis thinks of that again now, how it feels mismatched. Like a loss, despite Lestat being so present.
A deep breath in. Finds a smile for him, pleased with Lestat's approval. Let's all the rest fall away, as he explains, "She made it easy. I was lucky to have turned when she did."
She'd always been turning to him on those days, reassuring herself that Louis was still there. Still following, keeping pace. That he hadn't fallen too far behind.
"I should have taken more of her."
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He will credit himself, too, with Claudia's flair for the dramatic. Had, certainly, that terrible day on the stage. Thoughts Lestat considers keeping to himself to ruminate on, leaning comfortably against Louis on the bench as he considers the photograph, allows himself to acclimate to looking at it without some internal flinch.
Instead, he speaks it out loud. Neither of them have had much opportunity to do so, for different reasons. "That terrible day on the stage," he says, and knows it may hurt Louis to bring up, but bring it up he does. "I had worked hard, you know, to bring the crowd under my thrall. You make them laugh, you make them sad, you give them these petty things and they will do anything for you. Almost."
Not enough. A breath in, released as a sigh. "But there was a shift, when she took the spotlight. All eyes on her. I could feel it, the way she changed the room. Their ruthless joy like a quiet pond, and then, ripples. Terror, just a moment. Held breaths."
Louis was there, of course, but perhaps there is only so much attention to be paid when you've been hamstrung, beaten, preparing to die.
"I thought, there she is. This one I've made. This one I had every fear for, in the beginning. She looked at me," no, not that moment, this earlier one, "she looked at me and I think she knew. My hated pride."
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Lestat isn't prying. But the memory stirs up pain regardless, something to weather with a deep inhale, fingers running up and down the fabric of Leatat's jacket. He is here. They are here.
Claudia is still gone.
"Our daughter," Louis murmurs. A crack in his voice, eased by a breath, a pause. Gathering steadiness as he tells him, "She had plenty of you in her."
How different would things have been if they'd stayed? If Louis had tried harder to dissuade her from her plans?
"Headstrong," Louis says, a little laughter in his voice. "Talented. Voice like you wouldn't believe."
Twisted into something unbearable. But they don't need talk about that. Not tonight.
"I wish you'd seen her," softly. "I wish you'd gotten to see her before."
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Fond. Devastated. He gives a small, hasty nod at this last thing.
Thinking further back, to that precious period of time where Lestat had gotten everything he had ever wanted. Louis' hand in his, Claudia's in his other. He just hadn't known it.
"Louis," he says. Voice not quite even, but we continue. "It was me that ruined it for us. I know it now."
He didn't before, not even in his coffin in New Orleans, laying there for however long beneath the trash. Not even during the awful pantomime in the theatre. Perhaps while reflecting on his origins in Magnus' prison. Perhaps after he'd read his own story, spoken by Louis, penned by Molloy. But now—
It isn't hard, to trace the fuck ups. Before the ball. Before the fight. "And I am sorry."
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